menu

Device & browser quirks: tracking the weirdness

Posted by Scott on 03/29/2012

We do a lot of browser testing, and we often see ourselves and others
running into buggy behavior without knowing if an issue is already
known, or perhaps if a workaround is available. Problem is, there’s no
good place (that we know of) to easily search for known HTML, CSS, and
JS quirks and bugs in browsers – particularly issues that occur in
mobile devices, or require more explanation than a simple, “feature xyz
isn’t supported in browser xyz.”

The Device Bugs project on
Github is an attempt
to address this problem. It’s an open, generic bug tracker where we can
keep track of the browser issues we commonly face, and make note of
various related information and workarounds. While it’d be silly to
suggest that it could ever be comprehensive, we think there’s a good
chance for it to become a useful resource – especially with the help of
the broader community. As such, we’ve begun filing some of our favorite
quirks, and we hope you will too!

While Device Bugs is a normal Github project, it is only meant to be
used via its issue tracker. You’ll need a Github account to start adding
issues, but you can browse and search them without an account. Please
feel free to add any legitimate non-framework-specific browser issues to
the tracker – desktop browser issues are indeed helpful as well. If an
issue deals with a browser in active development, please remember to
file the issue with that browser’s tracker as well (but please still
file it at Device Bugs too). The Move the Web
Forward site gives more information on
where popular browsers’ trackers are found; some of which are not
public, making a resource like Device Bugs all the more useful.

Lastly, the Device Bugs project contains an issue
template
to make issue filing faster. If you don’t want to use it, that’s fine,
but including any of the information suggested in the template would be
very helpful to all.